The Origin of the Old Heart
From Chapter 4 of The Christian's New Heart
by Frank Allnutt

The deficiencies of the old spiritual heart developed in Adam, shortly after his creation. The irreparable corruption of his heart was the result of his sinful disobedience to God—eating of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2, 3). Adam’s “original sin” and spiritual heart defects were inherited by his descendants, which created in them a need for salvation, a new heart, and a new body. God’s promise of a new heart (Ezekiel 36:26) is a prominent strand in the “scarlet thread of redemption” which is woven in the tapestry of the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, to reveal Jesus Christ as our Lord of lords, redeemer, giver of eternal life, and mediator of the New Covenant.

The Creation of Adam
After creating animals, God created the first man (Adam) in His image. Adam was unique among God’s creation. Though Adam bore some resemblance to both angels and animals, he was remarkably different. His human nature was similar to angels in that he was a unique spirit being (a person), though unlike angels, he had a physical body—a similarity he shared with animals.

The components of man differ in nature from their counterparts in animals: “All flesh is not the same flesh, but there is one flesh of men, and another flesh of beasts, and another flesh of birds, and another of fish” (1 Corinthians 15:39).

The first step in the creation of Adam was when “God formed man [Adam] of dust from the ground...,” as a potter forms clay (Genesis 2:7a). This stage in Adam’s creation produced an impersonal “man” or human organism which consisted of an animal-like physical body with immaterial soul and spirit. This man organism needed two more things in order to become a human being: life and personhood. God provided both, making Adam a living human being. Scripture tells us that, after God formed a man organism from the dust of the ground, He “breathed into his [man’s] nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living being” (Genesis 2:7b). As previously noted, “breath of life” is literally “spirit of life” or “person living,” which we call personhood.

Adam had something God did not possess: a material body. Yet, Genesis 1:26 states very clearly that God made Adam in His own image. Since God is spirit, Adam was created in God’s spirit likeness—not as deity, of course, but as a spirit being. Adam’s likeness to God is seen in his personhood, which has several godly features, which we previously discussed (essential spirit being, uniqueness, morality, everlasting).

Adam, in his created state, was neither sinful nor righteous in nature; he was morally innocent or neutral. Had he eaten of the fruit of the Tree of Life he would have received eternal life and partaken of the divine nature, which, morally, is holy, loving, and righteous. But Adam rejected the Tree of Life and ate of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. That disobedient act resulted in, among other things, the corruption of his spiritual heart and physical body by sin, whereby he acquired what is commonly referred to as a “sin nature.”

Adam’s godlike personhood made him the greatest of all of God’s creatures—the first of a whole new species we call human.

Following is a brief history of Adam, from the time of his creation until his expulsion from Eden, beginning with...

The creation of Eve

1. God created Eve to complement and therefore complete Adam (Genesis 2:18-24; see also Genesis 1:27, 3:20, 5:1, 2; Matthew 19:4-6). Adam and Eve were equals in the eyes of God, though they had certain physiological and psychological distinctions that enabled them to perfectly complement and complete one another.
   
2. God gave Adam Eve authority to be stewards of the world and all that God created within it (Genesis 1:26-28, 2:19, 20).
   
   
3. God blessed the couple and gave them the earth to enjoy and to populate, and placed them as equals in authority over all living things. God told them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky, and over every living thing that moves on the earth: (Genesis 1:28).
   
   
4. God designed Adam and Eve to be dependent upon and submissive to himself. Though He gave them position and privileges, He did not give them total freedom or independence, as indicated by His command not to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil (Genesis 2:16, 17, 3:1-3). They were dependent on God and His provisions to meet their every need, and they were subject to His sovereignty. Indeed, God held Adam and Eve accountable to himself for their choices and behavior (Genesis 2:16, 3:8-24).
   
   
5. God created Adam and Eve with the power of self-will or choice (Genesis 2:16, 17, 19) to obey Him (experience His perfect will for them) or to disobey Him. Their disobedience resulted in death; obedience would have resulted in eternal life.
   
   
   
6. God created Adam and Eve with moral innocence in that the life He gave them was neither morally righteous nor unrighteous.
   

The Two Trees in Eden
The Genesis record tells us that God planted a garden toward the east, in Eden, then placed Adam in the garden. God grew every tree that is pleasing to the sight and good for food. In the midst of the garden He grew two very special trees: the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Like all things God created, those two trees were good.
How strange it must have seemed to Adam when God told him: “From any tree of the garden you may eat freely; but from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it, you shall surely die” (Genesis 2:16, 17).

Though the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil was good, Adam and Eve wrongly responded to it. They ate the forbidden fruit and their eyes were open to seeing good and evil (Genesis 2:6, 7). But they were were left to their own resources to respond to them—to self-sufficiency and a fleshly heart that was separated from God. Consequently, they lacked the power to overcome sin (evil motivation and behavior) and to translate the good that they saw into truly “good” behavior (love-motivation and behavior).

The fruit of Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil represents all the consequences of Adam and Eve’s disobedient choice.

At this point, we will narrow our focus on Adam because it is through the seed of man that life and moral nature are passed from generation to generation.

Adam, then, in addition to forfeiting an everlasting relationship with God by eating the forbidden fruit, entered the spiritual realm of darkness, which is totally void of God and the things of God. He became a man of darkness and a man of flesh because God’s light, life, and Spirit were not in him.

Adam also entered into dark relationships with several new spiritual masters: Satan, sin, and the death curse of God’s law. And when God banished him from Eden, he entered into and became first human slave in the fallen world. But there was more: God placed a curse on “the ground” (Genesis 3:17b), that is the earth and all of creation, as Paul indicates in Romans 8:19-22. Consequently, Adam and all of his descendents would face living on an earth that both reflected the glory of its Creator as well as hostility toward man because of God’s curse.

The Tree of Life represents God’s realm of light (among other things). Had Adam eaten of the fruit of life, he would have become a man of light, in relationship with God, God’s love, God’s Kingdom, and God’s grace. But when Adam was cast out of Eden, God prevented him, of his own accord, from returning to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Life (Genesis 3:24). (Eventually, God would provide man with a way back to the Tree of Life through the person and works of Jesus, who, we read in John 14:6, is the “way, and the truth, and the life.” When a person enters into an everlasting relationship with God through Jesus Christ, they have the option of continuing to function in self-sufficience or to live a Christ-centered life in His sufficiency. It is only through Jesus that a person is set free from the bondage of sin and can accomplish truly good works through the ministry and power of the indwelling Spirit of Christ.)

The Man of Flesh
Adam’s sin subjected him to dire consequences, some of which we will mention here, and others which will be addressed later on.

His sin permanently and irreparably damaged his spiritual heart and body, rendering his entire being as “flesh.” Paul refers to sinful or “fallen” human nature as “flesh” in both physical and spiritual aspects (see Romans 8:5-13), and as “soulish” ( “natural” or “fleshly”). This also gave Adam a fleshly or sinful “spirit” or predisposition.

The morally innocent-natured life Gad gave Adam at the time of his creation became corrupted by sin, and sin rendered his life spiritually dead. In this sense, “dead” does not mean that Adam ceased to live, but that he suffered a “broken link” to God as the source of his life, and was therefore spiritually separated from Him and His spiritual realm of light. Adam’s body became perishable—subject to death (devoid of life) and decay.

Adam’s fallen or fleshly human nature rendered him unsuitable, unacceptable, and incapable of having a relationship with God. Paul writes in Romans 8 that flesh and spirit are of opposite and opposing essences, and are of different realms; the two are totally incompatible with one another.

The Man of Darkness
Adam was separated from God and thoroughly corrupted by sin. His body became perishable and subject to death. His spiritual heart was rendered fleshly, his spirit “dead,” and his soul depraved. In a word, he was “darkness” (see Ephesians 5:8) and existed in the spiritual realm of darkness, devoid of God’s Spirit and holy light. A man without God, he was burdened with sorrow and guilt, subject to Satan, and destined for hell.

“Darkness” and “dark” are symbolic of sin and the realm of all that is ungodly—beings, things, and places, including Satan, his fallen angels, Adam and Eve, and all of their unsaved descendants. The “light” is the realm of light and godliness: the beings, things, and places of godliness—God, Jesus Christ, the Holy Spirit, angels and other heavenly beings, and all of redeemed mankind. “Light” sometimes symbolizes Jesus as well as Christians.

Adam & Eve: Myth or Biblical Truth?
The Genesis account of Adam and Eve has long been viewed as a myth by most nonbelievers and by some Christians. It’s no surprise, considering that, in the last century, the theory of evolution taught in our public schools has attempted to debunk the Bible’s story of the creation of man by God.

But today, many skeptics are taking another look at Adam and Eve and our descendancy from them—thanks to recent discoveries in genetics. Following are excerpts from a copyrighted New York Times (May 2000) article by Nicholas Wade (“10 Adams, 18 Eves get genetic credit for the whole thing”:

The book of Genesis mentions three of Adam and Eve’s children: Cain, Abel and Seth. But geneticists, by tracing the DNA patterns found in people throughout the world, have identified lineages descended from 10 sons of a genetic Adam and 18 daughters of Eve.

The human genome is turning out to be a rich new archives for historians and prehistorians, one whose range extends from recent times to the dawn of human existence....

Unlike the DNA test used in forensic cases, which is designed to identify individuals, DNA analysis that seeks to reach back in time usually focuses on lineages, not individuals.

From patterns in the DNA data, biologists can often estimate the sizes of ancient populations and even the approximate dates when one group of people split from another.

Though DNA can bear on historical questions, often by acting as a long-range paternity test, its most spectacular use has been in prehistory, where it has added a new dimension to the bare framework provided by archaeology.

The most detailed human family tree so far available is one constructed over many years by Dr. Douglas C. Wallace and his colleagues at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta.

Wallace’s tree is based on mitochondrial DNA, tiny rings of genetic material that are bequeathed only by the egg cell and thus through the maternal line.

A counterpart tree for men, based on analysis of the Y chromosome, has been prepared by Dr. Peter A. Underhill and Dr. Peter J. Oefner of Stanford University.

Population geneticists believe that the ancestral human population was very small—a mere 2,000 breeding individuals, according to a calculation published last December [1999]. But the family tree based on human mitochondrial DNA does not trace back to the thousand women in this ancestral population. The tree is rooted in a single individual, the mitochondrial Eve, because all the other lineages fell extinct.

The same is true of the Y chromosome tree, a consequence of the fact that in each generation some men will have no children, or only daughters, so the number of different Y chromosomes may steadily diminish, even if the population stays the same size.

This ancestral human population lived somewhere in Africa, geneticists believe, and started to split up some time after 144,000 years ago, give or take 10,000 years, the inferred time at which both the mitochondrial and Y chromosome trees make their first branches.

Mitochondria, which live inside human cells but outside the nucleus, escape the shuffling of genes that occurs between generations and are passed unchanged from mother to children.

In principle, all people should have the same string of DNA letters in their mitochondria. In practice, mitochondrial DNA has steadily accumulated changes over the centuries because of copying errors and radiation damage.

Because women were steadily spreading across the globe when many of these changes occurred, some changes are found only in particular regions and continents. Wallace discovered that almost all American Indians have mitochondria that belong to lineages he named A, B, C and D.

Europeans belong to a different set of lineages, which he designated H through K and T through X.

The split between the two main branches in the European tree suggests that modern humans reached Europe 39,000 to 51,000 years ago, Wallace calculates, a time that corresponds with the archaeological date of at least 35,000 years ago.

One of the most vexed issues in human prehistory is the timing and number of migrations into the Americas. Dr. Joseph Greenberg, a linguist at Stanford University, has proposed three migrations, corresponding to the three language groups of the Americas, known as Amerind, N-Dene and Eskimo-Aleut. Wallace’s mitochondrial DNA data broadly support this general thesis, though the arrival of the Amerind-speakers seems more complex than a single migration.

The European X lineage seems to have originated in Western Asia around 40,000 years ago. Wallace suggests a part of this group may have made their way to America via Siberia, even though no traces of the X-lineage have yet turned up in eastern Asia. A trans-Atlantic route is a possible alternative.

When modern humans first started to leave Africa, about 50,000 years ago by present reckoning, they probably consisted of small groups of hunter-gatherers a few hundred strong.

In their determined exploration of the world before them, they must have overcome, with the primitive means at their disposal, the extreme rigors of climate, terrain and perhaps the archaic human populations such as the fearsome Neanderthals who had preceded them out of Africa.

Where will genetics lead us next? Will researchers discover that their ten Adams and eighteen Eves had ancestry in the Adam and Eve of the Bible? Will their future studies someday conclude that mankind inherited not only Adam’s body but his defective spiritual heart?

Long before geneticists came on the scene, the Bible revealed the truth about man’s descendancy from Adam, his spiritual state of death and separation from God, and our inheritance of his defective spiritual heart, which is the subject of our next chapter.

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Ch. 5: The Inherited Heart Defects

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